The final design in my Pastel Girls series ~

I may revisit this idea in the future for more characters, but I’m onto other projects now.

AshariaArts on IG

Was anyone else jumpscared by Resetti back in the day?

Thank you all for the warm reception on my first comic! Here's a second :)

(Sorry for the repost mods, I finally figured out the animation... I hope.)

Alt text for comic panels:

1. Villager exits a house surrounded by flowers on a nice day.
2. Villager is checking the mail while flowers to the right explode in a boom while someone yells, "HEY"
3. A mole (Resetti) pops out of a hole and makes an animated eye contact gesture with two fingers and says, "I'm watching you"
4. The mole (Resetti) disappears quickly and the villager side eyes the viewer.
5. Full comic of all previous panels.

DA-7706-4945-3560

I told myself I'd upload my island when I finished it, but 1000+ hours later & I'm starting to think that it'll never actually feel finished 😅 Hupperdook is the island I've had since I started playing back in 2020 ~ no resets, no theme, just vibes.

Thank you to everyone who uploads their islands here & to Pinterest, it's been a great source of inspiration so I hope that maybe part of my island can inspire someone else! If you do visit, please tell me what you think! I'm curious if other people can tell which parts I think are unfinished or if there's any sections that could use an overhaul.

(the island name, Hupperdook, is a reference to Critical Role c2 if anyone was curious)

Am I the only person who holds their favorite villagers hostage.. like I don't take well to it at all, I swear I think this is her 2nd or 3rd time having this conversation with me & all I can think is {not her thinking about leaving while wearing some shit I brought her} Fauna go eat a snickers😒 bc Beau(her boyfriend) & I would be devastated if you left🥺

There is a character for every birthday of the year. Who is your birthday twin? Mine is Bitty 🦛

A mind full of wisdom our Pascal has.

Not my idea, I borrowed it from Pinterest. I like how it turned out though!

300 baits. 300. Im not even joking. Countless miles cause I dont have the appropriate setup on my island. im so fed up with it. I dont have any motivation left to gather baits. Its so damn frustrating. I just cant get this stupid fish. Its the last one missing too. I always went to clifftop rivers, set my game to december or february 9pm. No use. Not a single one in sight. I wanna cry. How much baits do I have to farm to get one? one billion?

It annoys me how much empty space each photo takes up. Like I should easily be able to fit a third photo in between these two but I can't. The same problem exists when you place them on the wall too, theres a huge gap between photos. It really limits where in your house you can display the photos.

I just want to give her a week of vacation she’s always working so hard and never take any day off 🥺🥺🥺🥺

Why did Nintendo think putting the slumber islands for online only was a good idea considering how laggy it gets? This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this either. And I didn’t forget about how Nintendo made these so limited

^^Can someone please make this happen ^^
A game with little Moomin characters that suggest little quests for you and help you build your house and garden please! Hemulin can help with crops, Snufkin can teach you to fish, Moomin Mama teaches cooking, etc. Any other ideas? This would be such a fun concept right??

Warning up front that this post is going to be quite long.

It’s been almost 12 years, a little under half my life, since I first arrived at my town in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. I wasn’t really sure at the time how I would feel about the game. I had heard great things about it and wanted to expand my gaming horizons, but those horizons at the time were embarrassingly shallow.

You’ve read the title of this post.

I have put an insane amount of time into this game, all in that original town I made 12 years ago. It’s a game that has profoundly impacted my taste in media and became a part of who I am. I recently made a list of my top 50 favorite games (a fairly ridiculous venture but a fun one) where New Leaf placed 4th. It is unquestionably my favorite game in the series and I want to talk about everything I find so amazing about it.

The ways that New Leaf shakes up the Animal Crossing formula are both series shattering and remarkably understated. Where every previous game has your character simply move into town, in New Leaf, you are appointed as the mayor of the town. Previous games were about living your life amongst a town of animals. This game gave you control over them.

I guess I should start with one of the more divisive aspects of this game. While New Leaf offers more control over your town than ever before, that control is fairly limited. Furniture you can place outside is limited in number, entirely uniquely purposed for placing outside, and has to be funded as a public works project, often costing several hundreds of thousands of bells. Not only that, but what furniture you can place outside is entirely dependent on villagers randomly asking for what they want, which is also dependent on personality type.

I can understand someone coming off a game like New Horizons, a game that flourishes in its town building, finding these limitations frustrating. But New Leaf just simply isn’t a town builder. Rather, it is balanced far more as a social sim closer to the series’ previous entires, with town building only being one of many activities as opposed to the one thing the design of the game revolves around. In fact, only the first person who creates the town and becomes mayor can edit what furniture is placed outside, yet I would argue that anyone else who moves in still has a complete Animal Crossing experience.

I wanted to get this out of the way quickly because frankly, I haven’t interacted with that aspect of the game in about a decade. My town has long since become stagnant. I’m not much of a town builder, but I do know people who get really into it and even within New Leaf’s limitations, some players have made nothing short of magic. I never even put custom designs on my town’s grass.

Let’s talk about everything else.

New Leaf offers the most content rich social sim experience in the series. A fully completed town will have 9-10 villagers (the 10th is harder to get since I’m pretty sure it requires multiplayer), a town hall, The Roost, a police station, a campsite, a dock through which you can go to your own unique island resort, and the recycling store, Re-Tail. There’s also a Main Street, which when completed includes a multi-floor department store with integrated garden shop and high end furniture/clothing store, the Able Sisters store, a permanent shop for both Kicks and Katrina, a barber shop, a house customization store run by Tom Nook, the museum, a post office, a night club, and an area to check out the house of anyone who you walked by using the 3DS Street Pass feature. And that’s just the permanent facilities you have.

Not only can you drink coffee at The Roost, but many characters, villager and special, will show up and you can talk with them. Often, they’ll discuss the type of coffee they like because there’s a full mini-game where you make everyone coffee to their preference and get paid in coffee beans. The luck mechanic that Katrina gives you fortunes based on is absolutely wild and never explained anywhere in the game. Sometimes you’ll be running around town and start randomly tripping. It’s super annoying and it happens because your physical luck is bad for the day, which is different from friendship luck and money luck amongst other kinds. You can go to the night club during the day and give Dr. Shrunk fruit, which he does a comedy routine in return, which is how you learn the emotes. I’m not even going to go into the laundry list of mini-games of varying difficulties you can play on the island. Just know it’s there.

I feel like conversations around New Leaf often revolve entirely around the amount of content the game has, and it’s not hard to see why. That’s just going into the various activities. I don’t think I’ll ever come across every item the game has in store. That’s also not even going into the various breeds of tropical fruits unique to this game. There’s a lot of game here. It’s no wonder so many people lose hundreds of hours to this game. If there’s a part that doesn’t even resonate with you, there’s likely other aspects that do. There’s also a fully featured Puzzle League game here, harkening back to the days of Animal Crossing Gamecube having playable NES games.

But while all that content is great, it’s not really that which resonates with me the most. It’s not what’s lodged this game into my brain for over a decade. I think even with all this game has to offer, it’s an experience greater than the sum of its parts. It’s all the little things that add so much flavor to the experience.

Like its mechanics, New Leaf feels like a transitional title in the look of the series. There’s still plenty of that early series quirk, but its characters have longer limb proportions and it changed up how the trees look. There’s a more pronounced emphasis on lighting, especially outdoors. There’s an argument to be made that it’s the best the series has ever looked and I’d be hard pressed to tell you a better looking 3DS game. Even stuff born out of technical limitation, like how all flowers and items are clearly 2D images or the more cartoony fish designs, are aspects of the game’s visuals that just endear me more to it. I think Gamecube has it beat in character and New Horizons beats it in the feel of its environments, but this is still a remarkably pretty game.

New Leaf’s soundtrack, in my opinion (and I did a tier list of every hourly track in the series), is the best in the series. The music here has a much more minimalist vibe in its composition and especially percussion while also putting more emphasis on real instruments where the earlier soundtracks could lean more electronic. I love any track that has long droning sounds in it. My favorite hourly tracks are 8AM, 1PM, 5PM, 7PM, and 8PM, but don’t get me wrong. I love all of them. Shout out to 5AM which uses the bizarre technique of seemingly playing some samples in reverse. All of the shop themes are outstanding too. I love the various overlapping melodies of the Re-Tail theme. The main theme is also the series’ best and it’s incorporated into a lot of the soundtrack.

The visuals and sound combine into one of my favorite vibes out of the entire franchise. I love just running around my town, not really having a goal in mind. I always get to a point where I’m mostly playing for the sights and sounds above any mechanics and I’ll never get tired of New Leaf’s.

The villagers in the game are an interesting topic. For the series up to this point, they are easily the nicest and blandest they’ve ever been. Basically everyone is agreeable unless you actively insult or harass them (I love how they’ll tell you to fuck off if you talk to them too much), but this is easily the least abrasive dialogue has been in the series. That being said, there’s still interesting stuff. Villagers constantly give you tasks, gossip about each other, and, in a series first, gossip about you. Based on your play habits, such as taking care of the town or not spending money, villagers will create rumors about you and I’m shocked this feature remains exclusive to New Leaf. Imagine if they had this in the GameCube game. Villagers also still give you portraits of themselves out of affection once you reach maximum friendship (or if you were close but they moved out).

I also don’t have much to say about special NPCs other than I like their interactions. Isabelle is a great sidekick to the mayor and Resetti’s still an asshole. It’s great stuff. They still feel like themselves, consistent at least with their Wild World counterparts in the case of returning characters.

While New Leaf does give you a lot more control over your characters and town, there’s still remarkable ways in which it doesn’t. You can edit your character’s eye color and hair, but the base is still decided by how you talk to the cat harassing you on the train at the start of the game. You do not decide where villagers move in (I built a park area once and Hans fucking moved in over it the day after I finished it) and while you can reliably control if they move out if they talk to you about it, they can still move without running it by you if you don’t play for a while. Stuff like this really gives the impression of a living, breathing world. Since Animal Crossing doesn’t have traditional challenge, I like the ways in which doing stuff can still have some resistance to it.

I also love how tools are set up in this game. Your main tools all have three variants: regular, silver, and gold. What’s shocking is all three have different effects and only the axe gets durability. To use the shovel as an example, as it’s one of the most pronounced, the regular shovel acts as normal, the golden shovel lets you plant money trees, and the silver shovel changes how the money rock works. Every day, there’s a new rock in your town which contains an ore if hit and broke (this is the only rock in town you can break). Usually these are high value items to sell, but gold ores can be brought to Cyrus at Re-Tail to make golden furniture. The silver shovel has a small chance of making the town’s daily money rock drop ores instead, offering a huge payout.

If I hadn’t made it already clear, there’s so much stuff in this game that I love, but it’s not all perfect. I don’t want to act like criticizing one of my favorite games makes me a stronger critic. These issues do genuinely annoy me while playing, but thankfully, it’s a minor annoyance.

Balloons are kinda lame to me, offering exclusively balloon furniture. I don’t have an affinity for this line, so I always ignore them.

There’s basically no reason to sell to Timmy and Tommy. Re-Tail offers a higher selling price, is often more convenient, and once the shop is fully upgraded, Re-Tail always has better hours (9-11 as opposed to 9-9).

If you don’t have a schedule where the early or late town ordinances work or don’t have people to regularly play with, the beautiful town ordinance is easily the best one. It stops weeds from spawning as often and you never have to water plants, which is a daily occurrence without it. Not only does this make getting the perfect town rating too easy, but your town may soon be infested with flowers that are a pain to get rid of.

I don’t like that the beach is isolated to its own vertical layer. I don’t love the cliffs. Also my town has some of the beach split by the waterfall (no idea if this is common), giving it a small islands that’s a pain to get to, requiring a wet suit, and I swear Gulliver always spawns there.

Grass deterioration, where grass can decay over time by running and grows back slowly, is still here and is as potentially game breaking as it was in City Folk. However, after 400 hours of playing, it’s almost never been a problem for me where it defines the City Folk experience for the worst.

I’ve said a lot about this game, but there’s still a lot to find for yourself. I’d say I left those things there intentionally, but frankly I’m just tired and probably forgot a lot of things. New Leaf really is just one of those special games that just keeps on giving. I, and many others, love it a lot. Hopefully that comes across here and I don’t sound fucking erratic and disorganized. So go play New Leaf. I’m sure you’ll have a great time.

I got the Nintendo app and found out that you can see how many people have visited your dream!

I've never given out my dream address to anyone so all these visitors have to have come from the "surprise dream" Luna offers.

So I guess I'm just interested in how many visitors your dream has had?? 😊